More than a quarter of London land is publicly owned. In the face of a housing crisis in the capital, there is tremendous opportunity to unlock swathes of that land for development. But where is it, and what’s the best way to release it?

We estimate that there are c.102,000 acres of public land in the city – a little over a quarter of the total Greater London area. However, much of this land is covered by public parks, roads, railways or other key infrastructure, and is unlikely to be suitable for development.

We’ve therefore filtered out constrained and unsuitable land parcels to find the amount of public land in the capital that could potentially be suitable for residential development.

After this filtering, we’ve calculated there are around 20,000 sites across the city, totalling c.18,000 acres with some degree of development potential. Many of these sites will already be in existing use, but some could come forward for development through re-prioritisation or reprovision of services, or through site intensification. Indeed, there are a number of bodies looking at efficiencies of land ranging from the Government via Homes England, to the GLA, and individual public sector bodies who are rationalising their assets and seeking to make efficiencies. There may be opportunities to accelerate these programmes.

These sites are not evenly distributed across the city. There’s a greater number of sites generally south of the river, with Southwark having the most at 978, and with a total area of 1,177 acres.

This amount of public land represents a significant opportunity for housing in particular, as the capital is still falling well short of its housing need.

How many homes?

If all of these public land parcels were built out at local average densities, then 693,000 homes could be delivered across the city. The greatest number could be delivered in Tower Hamlets, due to the high densities that are viable in the borough. It’s closely followed by Southwark, which has lower average densities of homes, particularly in the south of the borough, but greater amounts of public land in total.

Crucially, these are the areas in which land values should be low enough to make lower-mainstream homes more deliverable. This is the part of the market where the mismatch between need and supply is the greatest, and the public land in these areas could be used to help plug this gap. You can read more about this in our earlier blog here.

Despite generally being larger, many of the outer boroughs tend to have lower amounts of public land appropriate for development when compared to central boroughs. A large part of this is the greenbelt, restricting land use. This compounded with much lower typical housing densities means the number of homes deliverable on the fringes of the city is relatively low. Bromley therefore bottoms the list, with an estimated c.2,800 homes potentially deliverable on public land.

These current densities are based on existing infrastructure, however. Increasing the level of infrastructure could support higher densities of homes and significantly increase the regeneration potential of certain areas. It’s typically easier to achieve greater densities on larger sites.

Large-scale opportunities

We’ve identified c.1,300 sites over 20 acres. These larger sites present unique opportunities for large-scale regeneration. This would allow for greater densification of under-utilised parts of the city, and would be large enough for significant place-shaping, providing not just new homes, but leisure and employment opportunities as well.  

Such development could take advantage of public/private sector land adjacencies. We’ve identified c.900 instances of a private development adjacent to public land. There may be significant opportunity for private developers in such situations to collaborate with adjacent public land owners to assemble more land for larger developments, leading to more wide-scale regeneration and densification.

The housing potential of this public land has not gone unnoticed by both the Government and GLA. Between 2011 and 2020, 175 public land sites were sold in the city by a variety of government departments via its Public Land for Housing programme. Homes England (which coordinated the programme) estimates that the land released could be used to deliver c.32,000 homes.

All these figures of course represent an upper limit – partially due to the amount of public land with an existing use. Any practical level of delivery will be someway lower. Still, these figures demonstrate the scale of the potential opportunity of unlocking public land to ease the housing pressures the city faces.

We understand that not all these sites represent development opportunities, and there are significant challenges to bringing sites forward for development. There is great capacity for further delivery on public sector land in theory, but in practice there are numerous barriers. Our next blog will tackle these challenges, and consider other solutions to accelerating much-needed housing delivery.

Further information

Contact Katy Warrick and Ed Hampson

London’s housing crisis: is public sector land the answer?

The benefits of public & private partnerships in bringing forward housing delivery across London